The Civil War is remembered through its battles, but also through the decisions of the men who commanded them. Some of those decisions were brilliant, some were brave, and some were so far outside rational military behavior that even the soldiers watching could not believe what they were seeing. These men were not, for the most part, bad soldiers. Several were exceptional ones.
They were, across four years of war at a scale no one had been properly trained for, human. Start with Daniel Sickles at Gettysburg, because what happened to him on July 2nd, 1863, requires a moment to fully absorb. Sickles commanded the Third Corps of the Army of the Potomac, positioned on the left of the Union line along Cemetery Ridge. His orders were clear: hold that position.
Sickles did not like where his corps was. He thought the ground in front of him, a slightly elevated peach orchard about half a mile ahead, offered better fields of fire. He was not ordered to move. He had not received permission to move.
He moved anyway, advancing his entire corps forward without authorization, creating a salient that stuck out in front of the Union line with no support on either flank. When the Confederate assault hit that afternoon, it nearly destroyed his corps and came within a few decisions of collapsing the entire Union left. Sickles lost his right leg to a cannonball during the fighting and was carried off the field smoking a cigar. Accounts differ on whether this was genuine composure or a calculated performance, but either way, he kept it burning.
The leg was amputated, and Sickles had the bones preserved and sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, where they were mounted and displayed. For the next 30 years, he visited his own leg regularly. He also spent those decades publicly arguing that his unauthorized advance had actually saved the battle, claiming that by drawing the Confederate assault forward, he had bought time for the Union line to hold. A case can be made for this.
Most military historians have not found it persuasive. Sickles found it completely convincing. Ambrose Burnside’s performance at Fredericksburg in December 1862 was a different category, less about personal eccentricity and more about what happens when a fundamentally decent man is given a job he is not equipped for and cannot bring himself to admit. Burnside had been appointed to command the Army of the Potomac despite his own stated reservations about his fitness for the role.
At Fredericksburg, he ordered his army to assault Marye’s Heights, a ridge where Confederate infantry waited behind a stone wall at the base of the slope. The wall provided solid cover. The ground in front of it was open. There was no tactical feature that would allow attacking infantry to approach without being fully exposed for the entire advance.
Union officers who reconnoitered the approach understood this. They said so. Burnside ordered the assault anyway. When it failed, he ordered it again, then again.
Over the course of the day, Union infantry charged Marye’s Heights 14 times. Each charge produced the same result. By the end of the day, the Army of the Potomac had suffered nearly 13,000 casualties and had not come close to taking the position. Confederate General James Longstreet later wrote that his men had so much ammunition stacked behind the wall that a chicken could not have survived crossing the open field before it.
What Burnside did after the battle is the part that is almost impossible to categorize. He announced to his senior staff that the following morning, he personally intended to lead a charge on Marye’s Heights at the head of his old Ninth Corps. His generals talked him out of it. He was not pretending.
He genuinely believed that if he led the charge himself, something would change, that the moral weight of a commanding general walking into that fire would produce an outcome that 14 prior attempts had not. It was not a rational belief. It was the belief of a man who had run out of tactical ideas and replaced them with a kind of desperate personal sacrifice that his officers recognized as catastrophic and spent the night of December 13th quietly working to prevent. John Bell Hood at the Battle of Franklin in November 1864 represents something different again: a commander whose physical condition and psychological state had deteriorated to a point where the orders he gave no longer reflected coherent military judgment.
Hood had lost his right leg at Chickamauga and the use of his left arm at Gettysburg. He had to be strapped into his saddle to ride. He was almost certainly using laudanum for the pain, as was common for men with his injuries. By the autumn of 1864, commanding the Army of Tennessee in a campaign against Sherman that was going badly, Hood was a man fighting his own body while simultaneously trying to manage an army.
At Spring Hill, Tennessee, on November 29th, the Union force under John Schofield slipped past Hood’s army during the night along a road Confederate troops should have blocked. Hood woke to find the enemy he had planned to destroy was gone. His rage at what he saw as deliberate failure by his own commanders was described by witnesses as beyond anything they had previously observed. He ordered a frontal assault at Franklin the following afternoon.
Not a flanking movement, not a night attack, but a frontal assault across two miles of open ground against Union field works at 4:30 in the afternoon. The assault began with drums and flags, organized and ceremonially structured in a way that veterans in the Confederate ranks recognized immediately as the kind of spectacle you staged before walking into a killing ground. Six Confederate generals were killed in the fighting at Franklin. Six more were wounded.
One was captured. The Army of Tennessee suffered roughly 6,000 casualties in five hours, and Schofield retreated to Nashville that night anyway, where Thomas’ army destroyed what remained of Hood’s command two weeks later. Franklin achieved nothing that its cost could justify. It was, in the judgment of most military historians, the most expensive tantrum in American military history.
Earl Van Dorn, a Confederate major general and one of the more capable cavalry commanders in the Western theater, was shot dead in his own headquarters in Spring Hill, Tennessee, in May 1863. Not by a Union soldier, but by a Tennessee physician named George Peters, who believed Van Dorn had been involved with his wife. Peters walked into the general’s office, shot him once in the back of the head, and walked out. He was never convicted.
Van Dorn died not in battle, but at his own desk, killed by a problem no military rank could protect him from. James Longstreet, on the morning of July 3rd, 1863, was asked by Robert E. Lee to give the order for Pickett’s Charge, to send George Pickett’s division and supporting troops across nearly a mile of open ground toward the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. Longstreet had spent the previous evening and morning telling Lee that the assault would not succeed.
He believed the position was too strong, the distance too great, and the attacking force too small to carry it. Lee had decided otherwise. When the moment came for Longstreet to give the order, he could not speak it. Not from physical inability, but from something else.
He later wrote that he could not bring himself to say the words he believed were sending those men to their deaths. So he nodded. He gave the order for Pickett’s charge with a nod. Pickett asked him directly whether he should advance, and Longstreet, unable to say yes, incapable of saying no, simply looked at him and nodded, and Pickett’s division stepped off into one of the most famous disasters in American military history.
Longstreet watched it from the ridge. He later wrote that it was the worst moment of his military life. Not the charge itself, but the silent nod that had launched it. None of these men were ordinary.
None of the situations they found themselves in were ordinary. What the Civil War produced across four years of fighting at a scale that American military culture had no framework for was a pressure system that stripped commanders down to whatever they actually were underneath the rank and the uniform. What came out was sometimes brilliance. In other cases, it was rage or denial or the recklessness of men who had been in command long enough to believe their own judgment was beyond question.
The battles are in the history books. These moments are what the history books don’t quite know what to do with, and they are, in many ways, the most honest record of what those four years actually cost the people who had to lead them.